Sam Thompson has confessed he needs “help” after coming to terms with his well-publicised break-up from Zara McDermott.
The Made in Chelsea star welcomed relationship counsellor Paul Brunson onto his Staying Relevant podcast this week, and the topic quickly turned to his split.
Paul, best known as a co-host of Celebs Go Dating and Married at First Sight UK, took Sam through a crash-course in how to handle a break-up. “You’ve got to find yourself self-love, and that’s how you move on,” he explained.
Sam says that he hid his pain after breaking up with Zara in December, saying: “I thought I was OK. But apparently not. A lot of people are saying ‘Please help Sam’.
“Everyone keeps saying they can see sadness behind the eyes. I thought I was doing okay but 60% of people will be ‘help Sam’.”
Sometimes, after a breakup, the process of healing can take years, Paul claimed.
He explained that emotions and feelings are not quite the same thing, adding: “Emotions are our innate response to stimuli and our feelings would be our psychological interpretation of the emotion.”
Paul added that self-worth is “like the roots of a tree”, while self-esteem is more like the trunk of that tree. Feeling confident and secure about yourself is a key part of moving on, he added.
Paul, who is currently Tinder’s Global Relationship Science Expert, says that the reason why establishing a sense of self-worth is important is because “you need to walk away with a lesson”.
“You need to figure out how you can learn from what has happened so that it doesn’t happen again, so that you become better, so that even your partner becomes better in their new life or their new relationship,” Paul added.
He added that a lot of people make the mistake of trying to find a new partner straight away: “They look for, the next person instantly. Because it’s like ‘I need to find someone else to fill that hole. I need to find that excitement.'”
But trying to move on “without the healing” is always a mistake, he claimed. “Without self-worth, and without self-esteem, we enter horrible relationships,” Paul said.
Sam acknowledged that Paul was giving him a lot of good advice, but admitted that was doing “not much” to promote his own self-love after the collapse of his five-year relationship with Zara.
Amid speculation that Zara could be dating One Direction star Louis Tomlinson, Sam has been keeping his spirits up by posting a series of upbeat Instagram posts and gearing up for a live arena version of his Staying Relevant podcast with pal Pete Wicks that’s expected to begin in September.